posted 2007/01/15 at 17:59
Back in my younger days I can remember getting the second Joe Montana football game for the Sega Genesis around the time that it first came out. (For some reason they were less expensive than the John Madden games that were coming out, at least around Toledo.) Joe Montana II is perhaps most notable for being the first console football game to have vocal commentary throughout the games; although the commentary was primitive due to the technological restrictions of the time, I still felt like it added a lot to the playing experience.
Fast forward some fifteen years or so, and of course commentary is close to a standard feature on pretty much every sports game that comes out. This past weekend, probably because of Hockey Day in Canada on CBC, I got out my copy of NHL 2k6 for the PS2, which I picked up almost as soon as it came out simply because the in-game commentary was being done by the CBC's primary play-by-play and colour commentators for Hockey Night in Canada, Bob Cole and Harry Neale. (I still wonder why 2k Sports doesn't just go all the way and secure the rights to all the Hockey Night in Canada regulars, especially Don Cherry.)
In addition to a general buginess that seems to plague NHL 2k6, though, the game bothers me because it doesn't seem to know how to do Bob and Harry's dialogue right. The last time I played a game, Bob Cole told me about five different players who had a plus-minus of zero before the first goal was scored. Of course no one's going to have a plus-minus other than zero at that point. In the pre-game warmups I've had Harry Neale tell me that the Red Wings were a young team and a veteran team, making me wonder if the game even bothers to look up the average age of the players before deciding which sound file to spit out. Play-by-play often doesn't line up with what's happening on the ice, and a good part of the time Bob and Harry are saying things that they'd never say during an actual NHL broadcast, to the point where the game might as well just flash on the screen, "THEY'RE READING FROM SCRIPTS NOW."
What gets me is that I could probably do a good job of figuring out ways to make the in-game commentary sound a lot more like what you'd hear from an actual Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. I don't have a lot of training in computer programming (at least not enough to get a job at a company like 2k Sports), but I do know enough about simple concepts like logic loops that I could probably flowchart out the routines enough so that an experienced programmer could translate them into whatever machine language 2k Sports uses to make its titles. Likewise, I can't quite claim to be the most devoted Hockey Night in Canada viewer in the world, but as someone who works with words for a living, I think I possess a special skill set that would enable me to help make the commentary track more natural, useful, and realistic.
Perhaps I'm just putting so much thought into this because I'm still waiting to hear back on the jobs I've applied for here, but I seriously think that if there isn't already a position for this kind of job at 2k Sports, there should be, and I should be considered for such a job. It would certainly strengthen the NHL 2k lineup tremendously, although not quite as much as having a Coach's Corner during the first intermission of all the games would.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon